2. BETAMAX saved: The famous Supreme Court "Betamax case" was all set to go against movie watchers until Justice John Paul Stevens pulled two votes out the fire.

3. It's a bouncing baby CISCO: Like many career couples, Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner decided their lives were incomplete without having a router company.

4. CRACKBERRY in motion: BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, which sounds like it should be the name of a geek boy band, was founded in the Canadian city of Waterloo, which sounds like it should be an ABBA song.

5. CRASHING a jet for science: Fitzhugh Fulton must have enjoyed his job of remote-control pilot as NASA conducted its "controlled" demonstration crash of a Boeing 720.

6. Neuromancer popularizes 'CYBERSPACE': William Gibson's science-fiction classic won all kinds of awards ... and also brought the word "cyberspace" into the lexicon.

7. Dude, you're gonna be DELL: College student Michael Dell had the idea of selling computers directly to customers, much like his classmates might peddle pot out of their dorm rooms.

8. DISCMAN takes off: Two years after mass production of CDs commenced, Sony released the first portable CD player, the Discman. It was the size of four CD cases.

9. ABCs of DNA FINGERPRINTING: British researcher Alec Jeffreys stared at a batch of X-ray film and recognized a method for putting bad guys behind bars.

10. Your ELEPHONE'S ringing: Willy Wonka's "last major invention (1984) was the Elephone, a telephone that works in an elevator," says "Wikiality, The Truthiness Encyclopedia".

11. Future of FACEBOOK: Mark Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, to Karen and Edward Zuckerberg of Boca Raton, Fla.